Thursday, August 19, 2010

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Memento.Like a reminder of this life of trams, sun, sparrows, and the flighty uncontrolledness of streams leaping like thermometers, and because ducks are quacking somewhere above the crackling of the last, paper-thin ice, and because children are crying bitterly (remember children's lives are so sweet!) and because in the drunken, shimmering starlight the new moon whoops it up, and a stocking crackles a bit at the knee, gold in itself and tinged by the sun, like a reminder of life, and because there is resin on tree trunks, and because I was madly mistaken in thinking that my life was over, like a reminder of my life - you entered into me on stockinged feet. You entered - neither too late nor too early -at exactly the right time, as my very own, and with a smile, uprooted me from memories, as from a grave. And I, once again whirling among the painted horses, gladly exchange, for one reminder of life, all its memories. 1974